Man In a Double Breasted Suit

In the field of public relations where the gray flannel suit and attache case are what count, the figure of Raymond W. Miller in a dark blue double-breasted suit, armed with an old, battered briefcase is an incongruity. In a profession where rats race, and ulcers quickly age the youngest junior executive, the candor and youthful exuberance of Mr. Miller, who is 66, is an anomaly.

Yet, this indifference to the stereotypes of P. R., has not prevented his becoming president of the Public Relations Research Associates, Inc., and president of the World Trade Relations Ltd. since 1944. Since 1948 he has been a visiting lecturer on public relations and world affairs at the School of Business Administration.

To use a cliched phrase like "life began at 40" for Ray Miller is no indignity. For he insists that the best philosophy of public relations and of life can be summed up in a series of cliches, epithets, Judaic-Christian homilies and the cracker barrel logic he picked up as a farmer in his native California. "There is no substitute for simplicity," and "if you can learn to work with mules you can learn to work with men" he says with a perfectly straight face. This simple approach has become the nucleus of "his brand" of public relations.

Like all his offices, the one in Kresge is filled with files and records containing letters from clients all over the world, yet he carries every necessary document in his old briefcase. A public relations report that Miller made on Mexico for Dean Teele of the Business School and later used by the State Department was nothing more than a four-page outline.

To achieve the "personal touch', he believes so important, the chief P.R. man in the United States has become a world commuter, weaving an irregular 300,000 mile pattern from Washington, to any place in world and back to Harvard to teach his seminar. This desire to work with his clients has soured him on those things which block direct contact: the impersonal attitude to-ward business, "mimeograph machine public relations men" and the United States Information Service. "Public relations must be used as a catalyst to mix people and facts. Our first objective when working with a client is to help the client reach the point where our services are no longer needed."

In Miller's recent book, Can Capitalism Compete?, the answer (in the affirmative of course), is contingent upon America's success in selling the fundamentals of modern capitalism overseas. Miller says that many people turn to Communism because of a resentment of business practices. His own remedy to this critical situation he describes is embodied in the title to an earlier work, "Humanizing the Corporate Person."

A rise to international prominence after forty years on a California farm seems bizarre, but is one modern success story of which it cannot be said, "It couldn't have happened if there had been income taxes and the Sherman Act." The "lucky break" which started his public relations career came in 1935 after a shipping company representative heard his business views in an impromptu speech. By 1948 he had half a dozen offices throughout the country but was still an ordinary public relations man practicing "his brand" of public services. In September of 1948 a friend invited him to breakfast to discuss a job as trouble shooter for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. When the friend's secretary called the next day to ask if Mr. Miller "had gotten his shots," he was understandably surprised. The breakfast was to be in Bangkok, Siam. Since then, he has worked with the FAO in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

In every domestic and foreign assignment he has always adhered to another of his rules of thumb: "There is always somebody smarter than you are." From the beginning he has called on the top men in the fields of law, economics and politics to aid him. This is not to say that the scope of his advice is in any way limited to consultant knowledge. The "world commuter" is a lawyer in his own right and a regular contributor to agricultural, educational, legal, economic and religious journals.

How has Miller been able to duck the rat race, succeed, and yet avoid warm milk diets? By following his own advice--he never even entered it.